


Vous Vouliez Pour Rien

by ERNest



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Injury, Non-Graphic Violence, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Time Travel, meandering conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 08:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12250890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: There is an apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the unknown are mingled with these savage flames, revolutions are sphinxes, and whoever has been through a barricade believes he has passed through a dream.--Les Misérables, 5.1.18, The Vulture Becomes PreyJames Kirk is a ghost among ghosts, stranded in time.





	Vous Vouliez Pour Rien

Vous  Vouliez Pour  Rien

The boy is watching him again. Yesterday he crouched in a doorway so stooped and shrouded he looked like an old man, but now that he’s swinging his legs from an upended writing desk at the top of a pile of rubble, he’s clearly not much older than eleven or twelve. Jim looks away just because their eyes connect and still feels a chill, all the worse because he doesn’t know _why_. He’s about to turn to Bones to ask if he believes in ghosts but then he hears a snatch of song he recognizes from somewhere very old.

“Nothing here,” he tells the crew, feeling somehow that to deny the whistled tune is a grave betrayal. He directs them to search the next alley anyway.

 

They set up camp in an old café with posts painted pink, and a floor that used to be wood but is rotting under a layer of dust and something dried and brown. It is too horrible to think that all of it could be blood, yet it cannot be denied that _something_ happened here. They lay out a tarp and try not to disturb more than they have to. They are here out of necessity and because they have nowhere else to be, but that’s no reason to trample over what is sacred.

Jim’s sobs are not the only ones he hears that night, and the hand that traces his spine for comfort does not belong to Dr. McCoy, but he is unafraid.

 

In the morning he moves slowly, still sleepwalking or exploring a dream he can’t quite remember. Bones looks at him hard and offers him two caffeine pills when he almost never approves of even one. Jim takes the offered gift with a soft sad smile. He does not think it will have much of an effect because there is a presence here independent of his own physiology.

Today he keeps his eyes peeled for the boy. If it’s not already too late, he wants to do something to help. He is often insufferably smug but rarely vain, and while he tries not to believe that he specifically is _meant_ to be here, the conviction keeps sneaking up on him. He _must_ find that child, he thinks, and he finds him neither over nor under any piece of furniture.

Jim is not the kind of man to make bargains with something that isn’t there. He bargains now.

 

“Captain, look.” Spock holds the wire frame gently, like a fallen bird.

“Give them here?” The sun is hidden where they stand, but its light glints off the spectacles as they change hands, first the right lens, then the left. The contact of metal to skin sends a jolt through him and he almost drops them but holds tighter instead. “Combeferre,” he whispers. All but inaudible, the word pierces all their brains, the past in the shape of a bayonet.

“Comfort, Captain?” Spock says, eyebrows drawn together.

“No.” He forces air into lungs that have forgotten their job. “No, not that.” He looks at his fingernails, one long and the rest ragged, and raises the glasses to his face.

“Jim, no!” That would be the physician. The cylinder wavering in the edges of perception is unfathomably _new_ , all Progress and chrome. And then he is gone.

 

If he thought anything at all in that moment, it was that he would succumb to blackness, but the black does not come for him. Neither is there an uneasy period of waiting without a sense of time’s passage. He doesn’t even open his eyes; he’s simply where he is.

 

Well, at least he knows where the boy is now, wide toothy grin hanging eighteen inches above his face. ‘ _Gamin_ ,’ his brain supplies, and it is fitting enough to satisfy. “Oh, it’s you!” he cries and is roughly pushed back to the ground. He has no idea what’s happened but he finds he’s not quite ready to sit up after all.

“‘It’s you,’ he says, like _I’m_ the mystery to be solved!” huffs the gamin, but fondly. “Don’t forget that I’m the one who saved _you_ , mister!”

“And I thank you for it,” he says, relieved that he is able to laugh. “However, I must admit that I have little memory. Can you unfold my mystery to me, little sir?”

“Easily told, but not so easily explained,” the boy laughs. “For the past few days – before the last time I’ve eaten, but only just – you’ve been walking around my patch but not all here. Then whap, zap, you’re all here but not walking, no sir! You’re lucky I was there to tug you out of the sewer grate.”

At once he knows the state of the sewers in this place and time and shudders to think of it. “Very lucky. But tell me, lad, when you saw me walking were there others with me?”

The gamin shakes his head so vigorously his curls bounce on his forehead. “I didn’t see anyone else, and nothing happens without Gavroche sees it! Say, are you a ghost? You talk to people that are memories only.”

He shifts his shoulders a fraction. “Maybe so. I can’t say for sure that I’m not.”

Gavroche seems delighted by this ambivalent news. “Well you’re not Old Growler, but you’re _something_ , aren’t you?”

“Old Growler?”

“Haven’t you ever seen a Guillotine before!?”

“Oh.” Information floods his mind when that horrible word is said out loud and he has a vision of the blade and the basket while rivers of regret replace his blood, if only for a moment. “No, I never have,” he admits.

“We’ll have to fix that.”

 

Eventually Gavroche lets him sit up and brings him food he doesn’t inspect too closely. Maybe he sleeps.

 

“If I’m a ghost, where do you think my grave is?” He frowns. “Or where _will_ it be?”

“No, no, we poor don’t get graves any more than we get doctors. We have to die with no one’s help and then we’re carted to the potter’s field where the water creeps to our bones.” Gavroche tilts his head. “Or were you rich?”

“I don’t know.” The word doesn’t mean much to him. “I know I had the stars to fill my cup.” He remembers the cylinder waving frantically, the last image of that distant life. “And there was friendship, maybe even love.”

“So you _are_ poor!”

 

“Here now!” says Gavroche. “I saw a man – I didn’t meet him because he never saw _me_. Regardless, M. Mabeuf doesn’t have any money at all, and when he gets a little, he spends it on books instead of food. Fancy that!”

Jim, who is now allowed to stand and even walk around a little, stretches his back until it cracks, “Sounds like something I would do,” he says.

“So that’s why we’re not feasting on apples tonight. I couldn’t bring myself to steal from his tree.”

Now that he knows what could have been, he feels the lack but still says, “You did good.” They each chew on their own thoughts for supper, and to digest he adds. “You know, back where I’m from, money isn’t really an issue. Not like _that_ , at least. Everyone has what they need, even if some want more than what they have, and even they can usually get what they want if they’re willing to scrabble for it.”

Gavroche stares at him a moment too long, his eyes too large, his limbs too thin. “Money is always an issue. Goodnight!” The boy rolls over and snores almost at once.

Jim wishes he could apologize. He wishes he could help, but Bones was always the one to fix things. All _he_ can do is be a friend, or try to.

 

“Gavroche? You know all sorts of slang, don’t you? I’m wondering if you can help me out.”

“I know everything!”

He chuckles lightly. “I’m sure you do. What’s a ‘combeferre,’ then? The word’s been rattling around since I don’t know how long.”

The gamin gives a start. “Why didn’t you say earlier that you know the abaissé? It might not be too late, then. Come on!”

Jim trails behind bemusedly. Certainly he does what he can to support the underdog though there are days when he doesn’t know if he should do that as a soldier or as a diplomat. He’s gotten used to details filling themselves in as needed, but now with something so important he comes up empty. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet.

 

It’s not too long before they collide with a hurricane and are swept along with currents that pick up plenty of other people along the way. They cross the city and land in front of a café that is suspiciously familiar. The colors are brighter and there’s an utter lack of debris where he expects it, which shouldn’t scare him as much as it does. The superficial changes don’t disguise the fact that he’s been here before, years or centuries from now.

The man who shouts out of the second story window is younger than he looks and already losing his hair. “That’s the Eagle of Meaux,” Gavroche informs him in an undertone.

Bossuet calls to someone called Courfeyrac, but Jim follows the line of his gaze to three men who move as one: the human embodiment of a smile, a storm front or temple, a scholar who will only find peace once the world does. He remembers being part of such a triumvirate and wants only to return to where he slots into the spaces left open for him by the other two.

When the one who must be Courfeyrac steps forward, he gets a better view of the third part of the trio, enough to see that he’s not so much a leader as he is a guide. The instructions that swirl around him fade to nothing while the dying sunlight glints off the left lens, then the right. ( _Did he drop those spectacles after all?_ ) He _knows_ this man is Combeferre, and that the future will not come soon enough to save any of them.

He turns away from these fresh revolutionaries to lose his stomach, but there’s nothing left in it.

 

Someone ushers him into a room dominated by a spiral staircase where he remembers only a few stone steps like ragged teeth. Blast this double vision! All that fervor outside these walls should mean hope, and perhaps it does, but he worries that every piece of the world fixed _here_ will mean something out of place further down the timeline. A flurry of voices laced with laughter makes up his mind: he is here _now_ and he will do what he must to keep these colors flying. Nothing that nudges events even a fraction in the right direction can be considered a failure. Displaced as he is, he’s going to do the job he doesn’t have to do.

 

Enjolras – he’s learned the name of the chief – says the name _Patria_ the way he says _Enterprise_ and he is sick with longing for home, but glad to be stuck with the people he has found. Enjolras gladly eats the sin of one for the sake of all and promises to expiate his own crime. This is a man who understands that he can have no private life. He does not belong to himself when he already belongs to his Cause like that.

Jim is not and should not be a captain at this time, but he hopes it is not _too_ familiar of him to clap a hand on the shoulder of the captain he has chosen. The nod he sends says that he appreciates the lonely path Enjolras journeys so the rest don’t have to, and the nod he receives says that Enjolras would do it all again, no matter how many lives it took him to get there.

The horror-hungry silence still left over from Le Cabuc eventually eases into a quiet, almost peaceful, waiting game.

 

A young woman raises her hand to save a young man who doesn’t even see her and the bullet comes out through her back. In all the commotion he is the only one to notice the moment, which lingers on the back of his tongue like the time he licked a battery on a dare.

If this foolishly brave plan does not work and the National Guard refuses to back down, none but Jim will ever know that this frail girl died with the barricade. In the precious seconds they have left, he strives to memorize her features and preserve a life she might have known.

He stares so hard to lock her soul in his memory that his vision loses all focus. The hole between her metacarpals becomes a rip in the world, and through a glass darkly he sees the land of wastes this place will surely become. Whatever he’s changed with his presence has not done that much, or not yet.

But there is Bones who cries out to see him. The smile he feels on his face is the tender kind that begs for a steadying word. Spock turns in response to the doctor’s nudge, but whatever this barely tangible phenomenon, the window of opportunity is slamming shut. Jim is barely on the edges of the man’s vision, if that, when their brief connection ends.

He doesn’t know quite the sequence of events when he was out of it, and he won’t ask, but they are saved for now. Most of them are saved. Night seems to gather closer as they collect their dead. Jim finds a pretext to get Marius out where he will see the girl, and immediately forgets the words he used. He does not follow them, understanding that their discussion _must_ be private.

 

Though his natural state is insuppressibly buoyant, Jim has trained himself to stay still as the dead until moved to action when tactics demand it. He’s had such practice that he sometimes slips into this statue self as a form of reverie. Tonight it is both necessity and an acquired habit which sees him leaning against the wall outside Corinth, arms crossed and thinking of nothing very much. Whatever visions come to him disperse as soon as he gives chase, so he just lives with them and lets them go on their way as they will. Tonight’s reprieve stretches out further than any of them had hoped, which means its end will only be more ferocious.

“I _said_ , good _bye_!” At last Gavroche pierces through the fog in his brain, and Jim slowly untangles his conscious and subconscious thoughts.

“Why?” he says, staring at his hand and half-expecting it to be translucent. “Am I leaving?”

“No,” he says, seemingly concerned for Jim’s stability. “ _I’m_ leaving. But don’t worry; I’ll be back before you know it. I’m delivering a letter, but it’s not far from here, and the way back will be even faster.”

“Wait.” He can’t fix everything, he knows, but if he finds the right words he might be able to do this. “I haven’t forgotten that you’re the one who saved _me_ , mister, but if you can do one more thing for me I’d be more than grateful.”

“Hmm. Depends.” Gavroche looks for all the world like a man preparing to haggle. “Let’s see what you’re asking and I’ll decide if I feel like doing it.”

“Well, then, clear out of here!” He sees the boy about to protest and holds up a hand. “No, I _mean_ it. I don’t want to see you back here again, and if I do I might just throw you to the wolves myself.” He’ll miss the gamin’s enthusiasm, but an indefinite absence is better than the solid reality of a tiny corpse. He’s seen enough of those to know that.

“But this is where all the action is!” Gavroche whines, and he _gets_ it, he does.

“Today, sure. Tell me, though, who’s going to make the action tomorrow?”

With shoulders set back like that, and grin gone, he looks at least five years older. “Me. I’ll be the one.”

“See that you do. Your first step is to make it through tonight. All right?”

“All right!” His cocky salute makes him seem a child again, and he scrambles into the dark.

 

They’re all going to die here. Jim can see this as clear as the dawn that gathers on Enjolras’s brow even before he confirms that they have been abandoned. There is nothing he can do to make the job of telling them any easier, but he knows that Enjolras has chosen this position long ago and understood moments like this would come.

Halfway through the grim report he has to catch his breath all over again because he has thought through the layout of these four walls. Enjolras had to sidle past the bodies of his friends on his way to make a reconnaissance. What must have gone through his mind before he started speaking?

From out of the obscurity yet also right beside him, a voice offers the protest of corpses, and everyone joins in saying that they are more than ready to die. This is not his time, and he knows what it is to lose men senselessly. Otherwise that brave and foolish cry of “Long Live Death!” might have been his own. He knows when something so much bigger than himself is worth defending all the way to the end.

 

The cavalry never comes over the hill in the nick of time anymore, except when it does. They fight like a miracle is imminent and joke in the meantime. Now that they’ve gotten all the way through the thicket of despair, the light that hits them is bracing and purifying enough to look a little something like hope. An imperative just under his skin drives him on; like riding a bicycle, he is continually falling forward just enough to achieve balance.

The men and arms they lose here will not be replaced because all they have is what they have. So when their barricade trembles they hold their fire and laugh in the face of a trap they didn’t fall into. Perhaps they do nothing but delay their death, but these men have faith and Jim has his history, each telling them that after they fall here, another group of beautifully hopeful people will stand up to take their place, each movement pushing the world a little further to what it should be.

 

Joly checks his tongue in a mirror and it turns out that his grin is infectious.

“I think you’re going to like sonic showers when they happen,” Jim tells him, as if their survival is a foregone conclusion, and as if once that’s over with the years between them will be just a matter of footsteps. It’s a nice thought and it might even be true.

His friend rubs his nose sagaciously with the cane he carries everywhere, and a laugh bubbles up from deep inside him. “Now _that_ one, I’ve not heard of!” he says, question implied.

“I admit it’s not magnets, but the sound waves can recalibrate a body marvelously.”

“I’ll have to keep an eye out for them. Or invent one myself it that takes too long.” They both sober at the sound of wheels dragged over cobblestones. “Are you ready for this?”

“Who ever is? Are they ready for _us_ , is the real question. I’ll be along shortly.”

He glances around to check that no one’s watching, not that it would stop him, and checks his _own_ tongue. He finds no spots, but there is a shade of a science officer, raised eyebrow and all. It feels so good to know that he is _seen_ that at first all he can do is grin and wave. “It’s 1832!” he says next, and shows the date with his fingers in case sound goes wonky.

Spock nods. “We are trying everything, Captain,” he promises. Before he flickers away, Jim sees behind him that something in the future is green.

He puts it out of his mind and prepares to die if that’s what the cards have in store.

 

Jim’s go-to fighting style is hand-to-hand, all jump kicks and precise hits to the back. Obviously that won’t work in a situation like this, but he can adapt to most anything. He’s used guns before but won’t touch one now; compared to the steady beam of a phaser, the sharp report after firing always makes him a little ill. Besides which, he can’t be certain of his aim and they don’t have cartridges to waste. Courfeyrac hands him a sword that will stand up to lots of broad slashes, and _here_ he feels at home.

 

There is a man among them who carries a kindly musket, and Jim keeps finding him in the crowd without meaning to. He is a latecomer to the conflict but allowed a fifth man to escape into the darkness of life, which makes him central to it. Somehow this man reminds him of Doctor McCoy, another who would simply refuse the bitter calculus of five lives taken to save ten. But in this land of corpses not yet fallen and phantoms not yet standing to haunt, he’d probably grasp to anything that remotely feels like home.

The old man makes no attack, not even to defend himself, and as if the blades and bullets admire his dignity, they seem to avoid giving him more than faint scratches. But what _Jim_ admires is how he thinks of the wounded even in all this tumult. When he isn’t helping some injured party to safety he tends to the most vulnerable parts of the barricade, and when he’s not doing _that_ , his eyes rove, intent on something. He may be deciding where he will be needed most, or among this desperate band there may be someone that he cares for.

In all this haze and smoke it is impossible to know, and he’s barely spoken to anyone since he got here, but Jim doesn’t need to know the reasons to admire the act.

 

The infantry does not bother with surprise in broad daylight. They just keep coming like foam cut down only to swell back over the top of the wall. The only options are to fight back or to succumb, and Jim Kirk does not succumb. Together with Bossuet, with Feuilly, with Courfeyrac, he holds the line and it takes everything he can throw.

As the insurgency is squeezed ever tighter, and as people fall all around them, the torn cartridges are almost like snow, but that’s not all. The barricade is falling apart and raining its rubble down on them. Jim avoids the stones and falling beams, until he doesn’t.

Something hits him from behind and it happens too quickly to see what it was. He stumbles a little but recovers in time to cut down another soldier. It could have been a lot worse, he thinks, but if that’s not what brings him down, something else will.

 

Time stutters forward or pauses entirely; in combat like this it is normal for these to feel like the same time. Less normal is the blurring of the world, and how it only gets worse if he tries to focus on any one thing. “Oh, help!” he mouths piteously. Jim has gotten a worrying number of concussions in his life and even without a doctor on hand he can tell this one is bad enough that he shouldn’t have ignored it earlier. There is _no way_ this century is equipped to reliably help him, and he tries to remember if he’ll need to be woken every three hours or every four to be sure he’s still alive.

Joly cries out as he falls and Jim remembers that they don’t _have_ hours, or at least not enough for the distinction to matter too much. Funny, the things you forget. He jumps back from a sword coming at him, but it still tears the fabric of his pants and he thinks he may be bleeding. Someone’s arms catch him, try to guide him to an oasis of calm, as if such a thing can exist. One of them falls, impossible to tell who, and maybe it is a joint effort, but this time they’re not getting back up.

There are three quick flashes, something sensed rather than seen, and the bayonet moves on to someone else. Jim turns his head just in time to see Combeferre lift _his_ to heaven. Now he is not the weight that must be supported, and the soft gasp of air escaping his friend’s lungs as he expires hurts more than the gash in his leg or the pounding in his head. Combeferre’s head tilts forward and his glasses slip down into Jim’s lap. Those blasted glasses! Still, he raises them to his face –

 

“Jim!” The syllable which rips through the air is the sweetest sound he can think of. “Spock, I found him!” he calls, and there are two sets of footsteps coming closer to him.

“Bones…” He was about to be killed, he remembers, and maybe he’s still dying but right now he’s simply where he is. There’s a buzzing near his leg, probably the medical tricorder. “No, head first. Hurts,” he manages.

The doctor starts preparing a hypo before he’s even done talking, all Progress and chrome. They work so well together even when trying to make sure nobody dies. “Later you’re going to tell me everything you got up to back in – when was it?”

“1832. June.” He smiles. “Sure thing, you’ll be the first to know.”

He’s drifting off, secure in the knowledge that he’s in the best of hands.

 

“…So we knew to hold onto those old fashioned spectacles because they were bristling with time junk.”

“It was unstable temporal residue,” interrupts Spock, “but the Doctor is correct in the essentials.” Jim doesn’t bother to hold back his snort at McCoy’s indignant look, but then he spots a figure in the distance.

“Hold that thought,” he says as he jumps up, already running for the shadow of a printshop. Gavroche is older than he remembers, though not by much, handing pamphlets to passersby who don’t bother to appear in this intersection of two times. “I see you made it through that night, then.”

“And plenty of other nights after that,” the young man answers, his mischievous smile tempered with more assurance that he knows where his next meal’s coming from. “I see you’re back to being a ghost.”

“Yes, well, there are worse things to be.” He waves his hand vaguely to where his officers know enough to keep a respectful distance. “This is the part where we leave for good, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of anything!” They share a salute and a smile, and then Gavroche is gone.


End file.
